Robotic baby crib

This surprisingly pleasant looking crib is actually a robot, designed to keep babies quiet and happy all night long. Once inside and locked up, the baby is under the robot’s care. When the robot senses crying, it rocks gently back and forth. This should allow parents the time to catch some sleep. As pointed out in the article, the $5000 price tag is a bit steep. Especially considering the fact that you can get a much less technologically advanced equivalent for relatively cheap. How many of you hackers have babies? What hacks did you do to get your babies to sleep?

Hack? Mod? Who needs em. My kid inherited my gene pool, so he sleeps through the night, since month 2, unless he’s sick or going through a growth spurt (in which case, he finishes a bottle faster than i can chug a monster…)

Don’t most kids’ bedrooms have carpeting? With the weight of something this big, it would have to have some fairly strong motors, which would probably be loud enough to keep ME awake, thereby defeating the original purpose. And even for $5,000 I’d bet there’s no return policy.

The other thing to consider here is (as others have stated) why you even decided to reproduce if you wanted the tv/crib/computer/etc. to raise your kids.

What did I do to get my kid some sleep? Sat him in my lap while spending time with my computer – that way he’s got a head-start on the rest of the kids in his class with regard to computers ;)

If you prop the bottle just right, the both of you can get some shut eye when nursing.

The biggest problem we had was with getting Chilly to sleep. The only way to get her to go to sleep was to swaddle (wrap semi-tightly in a light blanket). I was the only one who could do it right, so if I was out, Chilly was up until I got home

Closest thing I did as a hack for baby was upgrading the baby monitor. I’m a deep sleeper, and the walls are thick. Since light wakes me more than sound I just added some super-bright LEDs to the volume meter on the monitor. And my wife started sleeping with her face buried in the pillow.

My baby get used to the air conditioning noise at night (she was born in summer), when winter arrived we did not used the AC anymore, so she would wake up every hour or two, so I recorded the AC noise in a CD and put it in continuous mode in a CD player, it work great!!

There is a theory that some of these low-frequency vibrations caused by taking the baby in the car or setting her on the washing machine may produce a low enough frequency to cause brain wave entrainment in a range that encourages sleep. BUT: only very high-end audio equipment can reproduce those ultra-low frequencies, so recordings of the sound will usually work differently.

my baby boy is 1 year old now and out of boredom his crib then his bed moded for quiet night
the crib waas given a motor with a ver offbalancd wheel on it to make the thing vibrate and the baby moniter was built in to the headboard .. then his lil blue racecar bed has the same plus LED headlights and tail lights rather then the unreliable bulb blower i was useing before as a night light soon to come is an FM radio that he can play with

I can’t imagine this working even a tiny fraction as well as an actual parent.

In fact, even if it worked by passively learning how the parent reacts (so it could copy exactly the same movements), it still wouldn’t work nearly as well. It can’t touch the baby with baby’s parent’s hand and it can’t breathe proximal air onto the baby (a big part of triggering some learned ‘soothed’ responses).

The subtleties make us human. And until it can replicate all of them, the product is probably overpriced.

If you don’t have a baby for this project you can of course MAKE ONE! It’s not that hard, you just need a willing woman partner, or if you’re a woman you’ll need a willing male partner. You can find instructions for this make project on the Intertubes everywhere. There are also many videos and magazines with details.

Once you have your baby in the oven you can proceed with the crib project. You can then spend many years enjoying both the crib and the baby.

Warning: the baby will grow up over the years and in the process consume many resources so be prepared. Fortunately your make skills can come in hand with the providing of these resources. You can also teach the baby how to make things, including it’s own babies (birds and bees project) so that your baby will provide for you in your rocking chair project stage of life.

I’ve brought two up. I modded one of those bears that make womb-noise sounds to be noise activated (having it on constantly seemed to get her acclimated after the first bit), but I didn’t take notes and used only parts from a pretty random tape recorder that had the same function, just located the on/off wire and soldered to it. They loved the cheap automatic rocker chairs. One liked having an ages old PC running acidwarp in front of it, when she she woke up she’d stare at it in fascination for a while and then go back to sleep (noticed she loved it on mine and set one up).